Adobe Photoshop CC | 1 Year Subscription (Download)

Don't buy this, just save your money and head for the full suite of apps - even though you're just renting them and when the subscription is up you won't have access to them. Adobe has locked down their software and, therefore, the customer. Honestly, try a different company first.That being said, I do like that these apps can be access across PC/MAC/iPad and your creations are saved in the cloud. Again, that's a catch-22 because once the subscription is up, so is your access to those files.Boo on Adobe.

But I just wanted to add one point for people that primarily do work in web design and interface design. There are many great solutions out there that best Photoshop in almost every area. Bohemian Coding's new app Sketch is one serious competitor to Photoshop these days. One of the apps main advantages is that it focuses entirely on web and interface design so you don't have to drudge through all of Photoshops bloat to be able to find the features that you are looking for. This is the way that it always should have worked but Adobe axed several applications that have worked this way (this last year they killed the once great Fireworks and a number of years earlier they discontinued ImageReady.)Tools are incredibly easy to find in Sketch, no digging through endlessly long menus with endlessly long submenus. The features that you see in Sketch for $80 are roughly the same ones you will see in Photoshop with many features debuting in Sketch first. This is one of those rare products that is both vastly better and vastly cheaper then the competition. I encourage you to search feature comparisons between Photoshop and Sketch. You might find that you will be perfectly happy with an older subscription free version of Photoshop (such as CS6) and then just let Sketch handle all the new web design features. A major upgrade to Sketch has been teased as of 3/22/14 so expect Sketch's few short comings to get ironed out very quickly.UPDATE 8-25-15 This is about the third or forth time I have updated this review but ever since I wrote the original review more great competition keeps poring in. One of the most promising new products competing with PS/Camera Raw this year that just came out is Affinity Photo. Here is a copy of my review from the Mac App Store:Nice start to a new suite of graphics appsI am a big fan of Serif’s drawing app Affinity Designer so I was very excited to see this new app in the suite that is even more tightly integrated then the Adobe programs. From the time I have spent playing with it there are a number of things I actually like more then Photoshop:Raw photography is placed inside the app rather then just from a plugin. This allows you to easily switch back and forth between raw editing tools and your basic photo editing tools.There is a separate persona for editing web graphics which is very nice. Photoshop now buries all the web tools in difficult to find places since they no longer have a web graphics tools anymore (Fireworks and before that ImageReady.) I found the separate app approach was easier and I am glad to see Affinity adopt a similar (and better!) approach by putting all web tools in a separate persona. I now have the advantage of having like tools grouped together without even having to leave the app like I did with Fireworks!The masking tools work differently then in Photoshop and allow for some interesting possibilities in how to hide certain parts of an image. It took me a little while to figure out how masking worked but in some ways I would say it works better.Affinity programs now share the same file so the days of making complex file structures in the Finder may be over! One file for illustration, photo manipulation, and eventually page layout (next year for the page layout.) This should be very helpful once Affinity moves to iPad that has a simpler file structure.The main short comings of the product to me is that it doesn’t have a way to easily batch edit photos or do cataloging. The way that I do most of my photography these days is do a photo shoot of similarly shot photos, edit one of the photos and then apply those changes to all the others. This is a huge time saver over editing one photo at a time. Until Affinity Photo has those features I don’t see using it as my main editing program. The developers have talked about looking at adding some of those features so I hope that happens soon.Overall great version one software. Adobe will probably become the Quark XPress of graphics software. What I mean by that is Quark was once dominate but better options came along and eventually overthrew them. Remember InDesign use to have far fewer users then Quark at one point. I personally believe the Affinity Suite can go after Adobe even quicker then the time it took InDesign to become dominate Quark. ID 1.0 was very immature but Affinity 1.3 is quite good from the start.UPDATE 2014: I have been using the new version 3 of Sketch for several weeks now and it is awesome! Version 2 was already very good and they still managed to make version 3 way better. Now includes support for symbols and a very easy and powerful way to export images.Thanks to everyone who marked my review as helpful and even to those few Adobe employees who marked it as unhelpful!! I am glad you are reading these reviews so you can learn more about how your competition is going to thoroughly wipe you out in the next few years! Cheers!PS It has been helpful to me to hear the reviewers on this page talk about competition to Photoshop I was not aware of. Sketch focuses on webdesign like I said but I would be interested in replacing Photoshop in other areas besides web design as well.UPDATE 9/24/14: I just recently came across another really good replacement for Adobe software that in many cases blows the Adobe option out of the water. I spent almost all of today working with Serif's Affinity Designer and it is a really incredible alternative to Illustrator. Since a lot of designers use Photoshop and Illustrator closely together to draw I thought it would be appropriate to mention it here on the Photoshop page.I was one of those people who was very frustrated when Adobe killed Freehand to replaced it with Illustrator which I always loathed. I am so glad to see that Affinity Designer seems to have the user friendliness of Freehand and yet also has powerful features that surpass many of Adobe's features. I will just briefly mention a few of my favorites.- Affinity has lots of live actions you can view by scrolling through a list. This one is a big time saver. If you ever wanted to see what a blending mode looked like on an object without having to click each blend mode one at a time down a list of 26 blend modes you can do that in Affinity Designer. You simply move your mouse over each blending mode and the object changes as you go down the list. This functionality works across many areas of the app. You also can use it as a quick way to scrub through the history panel as well.- The eyedropper tool works across different programs to pick up a color you want to include in your design. This is really helpful as half the time I want to select a color outside of the drawing program.- The company has worked on a rotation canvas feature that allows for better arm angles when you draw on a tablet. Photoshop users will be familiar with this feature but Adobe never moved it over to their drawing app where it really belongs. One of the developers showed it off on their forum page and it seemed to work just as well as it does in Photoshop. The feature will be available in a later version.- Serif is planning on releasing a whole Affinity suite that will also have competitors to InDesign and Photoshop. Interestingly enough the software suite should rely on a single file format that will be used across their whole line of apps. At this time only the illustration program has been released but the other apps will be coming out very soon. A Photoshop competitor should be out in a couple months or so. What I really like about this company is when I use their product I keep thinking "this was what I kept waiting for Adobe to do years ago but they never did".Occasionally I hear people talk about how Adobe has become mature and all the major features to their programs have already been added. I think it should be clear that software like Sketch, Affinity Designer, and Pixelmator are proving that wrong.Also I expect there to be a lot more competition to Lightroom in the future. Lightroom is still a very immature program and has a lot of opportunity for competitors to take advantage of it's weaknesses. Capture One Pro just came out with a new update and it looks like good competition to Lightroom. The touch version of Pixelmator just came out and I can't find a review that doesn't say that it is substantially better / more feature rich then the touch version of PS. Expect a flood of Adobe competitors to keep surpassing their products. There is not much reason to join Adobe's subscription service and keep paying for their mediocre updates.UPDATE 2016:Affinity Designer is now on Mac and Windows. Affinity Photo is on Mac and available as a beta on Windows. Spread the word so that people know this program is now available on both platforms.UPDATE 2017:Serif came out with their Affinity Photo iPad app that does much more then Adobe’s iPad photo tools. The desktop versions continue to add features that Adobe doesn’t have. Quark has a great deal on XPress for $400 for the people who use competition products. That is a great deal as their new version 13.

You paid, but you never really own the software. If you are not using it all the time, you are paying for nothing. I think Adobe got rid of stand alone version really sucks.

Do not support greedy companies like Adobe. Subscription is one big joke.

Adobe is using a business model for people who makes money from the tool and left home/hobby users out of options; I prepaid one year after finishing the subscription decided to move to Corel Photo paint. Will have to learn again but I prefer that to being drained.

I personally hate the way adobe is doing business: instead of offering both one-time purchase and subscription-based purchase, they are trying to make more and constant income through only offering this. What a rip-off! I will turn to other software which provide similar features now.

Have been using PS since the early 90's and have upgraded numerous times. I'm sure this new CC version is very nice for business use full time, but I'm dismayed they have dropped the users like me who work off and on using the software as we need it. I have PS CS5 and went on line to check out the latest improvements and thinking I would get the latest version with a reduced upgrade price like I've done in the past... WRONG I'm finally going to pull the plug on using PS. There are other software image editing programs that do just as much as PS and for a lot less money. Even ACDsee, an excellent file organizer and viewer has improved it's editing capability to the point that is will do most of what PS does and much more easily. Their packages range from $60-$150 depending on features and their upgrade prices are about half that much. Oh, and their file manager puts PS to shame. Also, Affinity Photo now works with Mac and Windows and is only $49

The code provided by Amazon doesn't work so now I have to run around finding someone to reset something for me. Mistake buying from Amazon, should have just gone directly to Adobe.